


The Frog in the Well

by Lisse



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Hetalia Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 08:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2262720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Which one were you before? North or South?"</p><p>"Yes," Korea says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Frog in the Well

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a hetalia_kink prompt.

Korea does, in fact, have a birthdate and birthplace. Actually he has many birthplaces - dozens, hundreds - but over the centuries he's discovered that people have a hard time thinking like that, so on the rare occasions the paperwork requires it, he writes "Gwangju, 1980."  
  
"You don't look thirty-four," the clerk says absently as she stamps things and signs things and does all the odd filing and shuffling familiar to governments the world over.  
  
Korea shrugs. "I'm not. I'm five thousand."  
  
The clerk looks up at him. Her name is Lee Minji, she is twenty-nine, married, expecting her first child. She likes black bean noodles and hates her mother-in-law. It's written on her in hanja calligraphy. "So you are," she says, and staples the stack of papers before she hands them over. "But you  _look_  sixteen."  
  
It's kind of weird, when he stops to think about it. How blasé his people are about him.  
  
"You're not ditching school to do this, are you?" Lee Minji asks, raising an eyebrow at him.  
  
"It's okay," Korea says cheerfully. "I'm not a student today."   
  
"What do you need all these papers for anyway?" She nods to the stack he's clutching in both arms.  
  
"Nothing big. I just need it for Chuseok." He bows as he gets up out of his chair and calls out "Your mother-in-law's sleeping over at her sister's tonight!" as he leaves.  
  
He sees Lee Minji's face break into a sudden smile right before the door swings closed behind him.  
  
*  
  
Part of the problem with being a country is that countries don't really exist in just three dimensions. There's memory, there's different people's perceptions, there's the great big rolling flood of history building up behind a dam until something shakes it loose. (There's a reason his most recent birthplace is Gwangju.) Humans are linear, straight-line creatures - and to be sure, the part of Korea that is a loudmouth teenager named Yongsu is much the same. But the part of Korea that is  _Korea_  sprawls across time and space and inconvenient national borders without much regard for them, tugged along by fifty million thoughts and movements and ideas.  
  
Countries don't shape their people. It's very much the other way around.  
  
*  
  
He goes to school, because he is technically a teenager and that's the sort of thing teenagers do. It's a little rural school in South Jeolla, a half-hour's drive outside of Gwangju, where the evening cram schools are few and far between and most of the students have no particular ambitions. No one there really forgets who he is ( _what_  he is), but they don't really  _remember_ , either; he is the Republic of Korea, but he is also Yongsu, the class clown who takes the most photogenic selfies to ever grace a Kakaotalk chat and flirts with the captain of class 2-2 and somehow always has test scores that line up perfectly with the school average.  
  
"So," the boy next to him says during the break period. (Jaehyuk, alcoholic father, mail-order Vietnamese mother, vague mostly-crushed dreams of being an architect.) "What  _were_  you? Before, I mean."  
  
Korea stops trying to stuff half a pack of shrimp chips in his mouth. His hair is messy and he hasn't bothered to change out of his P.E. clothes, making only the barest concession to the school uniform rules by throwing his necktie around his neck. "Before what?"  
  
"North or South, I mean."  
  
"Oh." Korea swallows the shrimp chips and steals Jaehyuk's milk off his desk. "Yes."  
  
"Yes what?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Jaehyuk swats him upside the head and mutters "Don't be an ass." In the Blue House, in the presence of the president and the government, that would be treason.  
  
Here he is just Yongsu. He drinks Jaehyuk's milk, ducks a pencil thrown like a ballistic missile, and wonders if he remembered to do his math homework.  
  
*  
  
"I'm thinking of going north," he says. "For Chuseok."  
  
President Park looks like he's giving her the beginnings of a migraine. "You said your hometown is Gwangju."  
  
"It is."  
  
"You go to your  _hometown_  for Chuseok."  
  
"Yes." Korea shrugs. "So I'm going north."  
  
"You're very frustrating," she says, half annoyed and half fond. Like every president before her - like most of his people, really - she doesn't bother with honorifics or even formal speech when she talks to him. That makes sense; people know their country like they know their family.  
  
Korea grins at her. He has been told he is rude, letting his feelings and emotions bubble up to the surface, but he is no more or less than what his people made him. "I  _invented_  frustrating," he admits. "Tell you what, I'll bring you back a present. I'll steal one of their big statues. You can hang a bird feeder on it."  
  
"If you cause a diplomatic incident, I'll make you do army service again."  
  
"Only if I get to be an officer this time," Korea retorts. He bows to her exactly the same way he bowed to Lee Minji and scurries out before she can make good on her threat.  
  
*  
  
For Jaehyuk's birthday, Korea buys him a book about architectural design. On the cover page he writes "I expect the best skyscrapers in the world from you, dipshit" and signs it with the complicated dips and loops of his official name, all in hanja.  
  
"I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to play favorites," Jaehyuk says. He's touched, but doesn't show it; Korea can see the brushstrokes of it written on his skin.  
  
"I can if I want to." Korea turns his English workbook upside-down in an attempt to make heads or tails of it. He speaks it fluently, of course - and Vietnamese, and Cambodian, and Uzbek, and all the languages of the migrant workers and foreign wives - but the part of him that is Yongsu has forgotten how to conjugate the past tense again. "I used to go boating with Yi Sun Shin. He pushed me in the water once."  
  
Jaehyuk makes a choking noise. "I'm not Admiral Yi, dumbass. That's not the same."  
  
Korea shrugs. "Says who?" he asks, and then flails around and yells "Ow!" when Jaehyuk punches him in the shoulder instead of hugging him.  
  
*  
  
Korea was born on May 18th, 1980. At the same time, he was born on August 15th, 1948, and March 1st, 1919, and a hundred other dates, many of which have been long-forgotten. He is five thousand years old, or possibly older. All of this is hard to explain to people who can't think in the right amount of dimensions, so he doesn't try.  
  
He hops on a tour bus heading towards the DMZ, kicks off his sneakers, and sits with his stocking feet propped up on the chair in front of him. The man sitting next to him has short hair and bad eyesight and a wife he mostly gets along with and two children in halfway decent colleges. He works in finance and plays screen golf religiously. He has been secretly, almost subconsciously in love with his best friend for forty-three years.  
  
" _Ajeosshi_." Korea elbows the man in the arm, as he has done to kings and soldiers and farmers and butchers and just about everyone in between. "Any chance you can explain calculus to me?"  
  
The man looks at him. His name is Kim Chulsu, but he gets prickly about kids disrespecting him and calling him by name, even when the kids are his country. "Shouldn't you be in school?"  
  
"Nope," Korea says. His smartphone buzzes. It's the prime minister, so he ignores it. "But I will be next week and I have a test."  
  
"How did you make it this far not knowing how to do calculus, kid?"  
  
Korea the country knows all kinds of complex mathematics. Yongsu prefers to sleep through class because Teacher Lee has a voice like a buzzsaw. He shrugs.  
  
Kim Chulsu harumphs and slouches in his seat. Korea plays Anipang on his phone until he runs out of lives and waits until he's off the bus before he punches in a new number and texts:  _1978\. He would have kissed you back._  
  
Then he wanders north.  
  
*  
  
"Which one were you?" some former president or another asks, rattling off the ancient kingdoms on his fingers. "Baekje? Silla?"  
  
"Yes," Korea says.  
  
*  
  
Jaehyuk sighs at him. "You went to North Korea for Chuseok? Isn't that illegal?"  
  
Korea smirks and tries to fit an entire Chocopie in his mouth. He wonders if President Park likes her new statue. He drew a mustache on it and everything. "Mmrp prrf," he says, and then swallows and tries again. "Can if I want to. What about you?"  
  
His friend (Yongsu's friend, but occasionally they are one and the same) slumps and rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I went to my grandmother's house." He doesn't say that his grandmother dislikes him and his mother, nor does he mention anything about the simmering hatred his father's family has for outsiders and foreigners. He doesn't have to; it's written right there on his skin.  
  
He throws another Chocopie at Jaehyuk's head. "Did I ever tell you my hometown's in Cambodia?"  
  
"Bullshit. It's Gwangju, you told me."  
  
"Yeah, I know." He props his chin on his hand. "Don't you think I've got more than one?"  
  
Jaehyuk looks at him - and then, suddenly, he gets it. He sees the great sprawling shape of what Korea actually  _is_. For a split second, there's nothing on his face but wide-eyed awe.  
  
He loses it again a moment later, because people aren't meant to hold on to that kind of thinking for very long. But it's enough. The writing about his grandmother and his father's family fades from his skin.  
  
Countries don't shape their people, but Korea's never been above a little bit of cheating.  
  
"Can I copy your math homework?" he asks. "I didn't do mine."  
  
Jaehyuk throws the Chocopie back at him. "Lazy asshole," he mutters, and Korea smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> The three birthdays that got specifically mentioned:
> 
> March 1st, 1919: the start of the March 1st Movement, one of the first cases of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule.  
> August 15th, 1948: the day the Republic of Korea (South Korea) was officially formed.  
> May 18th, 1980: the start of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, which was a huge pro-democracy uprising against the authoritarian South Korean government.


End file.
